Abuse goes unpunished

Rostov, Russia

A Russian colonel who kidnapped, raped, and murdered a Chechen teenager was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity last week. The trial of Yuri Budanov, which took more than a year, was widely seen as a test of the army’s willingness to punish appalling human rights abuses by soldiers in the breakaway Russian province of Chechnya. Budanov admitted killing the girl, Elga Kungayeva, but said he was very drunk at the time and thought she was a sniper who had killed several of his men. “What can be said about justice in Chechnya?” Arsen Sakalov, head of the Chechnya Justice Initiative, told The New York Times. “Everything that happens proves that there is no justice there.”